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Africa Policy E-Journalgiven the difficulty in maintaining up-to-date links in old files. However, we hope they may still provide leads for your research. Liberia: U.S. Policy (part 2) Date Distributed (ymd): 950916 The following is excerpted from a longer article entitled "Liberia: A Casualty of the Cold War's End," by Reed Kramer, managing editor of Africa News Service, who has covered Africa and U.S.-Africa policy for more than two decades. It appeared as the July 1995 issue of CSIS Africa Notes, and is available for $4.00 per copy from the African Studies Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1800 K Street, Washington, D.C. 20006 USA. Tel: (202) 775-3219. The article also can be viewed (after October 1) on the new Africa News Service Web site, AFRICA NEWS ONLINE (http://www.afnews.org/ans). Liberia: A Casualty of the Cold War's End by Reed Kramer [part 1, primarily on the Reagan years, appears in a separate file] U.S. Policy in the 1990s The connections spanning two centuries and the particularly close ties of the 1980s led Liberians and others to expect that the United States would help when trouble came. The 1989 insurgents were led by Charles Taylor, 40, a former procurement clerk in Doe's government who fled to the United States after being charged with embezzling a million dollars, was detained in Massachusetts for extradition and escaped from jail while awaiting a hearing. The rebels expected to quickly garner support and cover the 200 miles to Monrovia in a matter of weeks. Doe's army responded by rushing reinforcements to Nimba County, where the rebel force was advancing, but the soldiers, who were mostly Krahn (Doe's ethnic group), helped stir antigovernment sentiment throughout the area by indiscriminately attacking villages and murdering civilians. Two American military officers were dispatched to advise on "restoring and maintaining discipline" among the troops, the Department of State announced. The unrest caused mild alarm in Washington. An interagency working group, chaired by Assistant Secretary Cohen, was convened to review the situation and reexamine options. This was followed by extensive discussions in the Deputies Committee. "There were different views on how active we should be," said one participant, "but ultimately, the prevailing view was that this was something for the Liberians to work out themselves." The policy that evolved throughout 1990 can be viewed through the prism of three guiding principles. 1. Reluctance to Break with Liberia's Rulers. As soon as the first reports arrived from Nimba, there were a few calls within the administration for a course correction that would distance the United States from Doe's unpopular rule. Many of the officials taking part in the early discussions at mid-level had direct experience in Liberia, and some had tutored Doe in everything from diplomatic protocol to separation of powers. Having directed the heavy investment in promoting Liberia's "experiment in democracy," most thought the policy was working and "fought like hell to maintain it," in the words of one dissenter. As the deliberations moved up the policy chain, new global considerations took precedence. Liberia's proven utility as a military staging base and intelligence monitoring site weighed in Doe's favor. Moreover, policymakers were instinctually leery of Taylor, since they had intelligence indicating he had received modest backing from Libya, including training for some of his men. 2. Disregard for the Potential Impact of Low-Level Engagement. U.S. prestige carried more sway in Liberia than most senior policymakers realized in their 1990 evaluations. The inclination was to downplay the significance of historical ties rather than employing them as tools for successful diplomacy. "We deployed a large marine amphibious force near Liberia to evacuate U.S. citizens, an operation accomplished with great efficiency," Cohen said in the previously cited interview. "A modest intervention at that point to end the fighting in Monrovia could have avoided the prolonged conflict." The decision to deploy the four-ship task force was taken on May 31, 1990 by the Deputies Committee, chaired by Scowcroft's number two, Robert Gates, and officials hoped the move was merely precautionary. "Gates worried that if we sent the Marines ashore, desperate Liberians would rush the embassy and CNN would be there showing the grisly sight," a participant in the deputies sessions said. Meanwhile, horror stories from Liberia received little attention in the United States, even though the fighting was moving into Monrovia and claiming hundreds of lives. Although there was widespread disappointment with the American approach, respect for U.S. power remained high. In August 1990, the White House saw first-hand what direct involvement could achieve. Officials wanted to mount a rescue effort for Americans and other foreigners trapped by the fighting in Monrovia without landing Marines in the capital. A convoy of vehicles was organized to travel from the U.S. embassy through an area of Monrovia where many other foreign embassies were located (and where foreigners had taken refuge) and then south 65 miles to Buchanan, Liberia's second largest city. The plan required cooperation from rebel leader Taylor, whose forces controlled Buchanan. Taylor had sent signals that he wanted to work with the U.S. government, but many officials remained skeptical of his intentions. After lengthy discussion, Admiral David Jeremiah, deputy to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, placed a call to Taylor by satellite phone. Taylor agree to allow evacuation helicopters to land, and the rescue took place without incident. A more dramatic demonstration of what Washington could do came the following month during a trip to West Africa by Assistant Secretary Cohen following the capture and killing of Doe by another rebel faction, headed by former Taylor protigi Prince Johnson. A multinational West African peacekeeping force dispatched to Liberia in late August had managed to separate combatants but was itself coming under heavy fire from Taylor's troops. Mediation efforts had failed repeatedly, but Taylor told Cohen he would agree to a U.S.-brokered truce. "With the United States involved, we can have peace," Taylor's spokesman said when the cease-fire was announced. News of the break-through was not well received at the White House where officials accused Cohen of exceeding policy guidance. "He was ordered to come home and explain his actions," according to one official involved in the incident. Taylor felt tricked, as he confirmed during an interview the following year. Asked in a tape-recorded session his attitude towards the United States, where he lived for several years, Taylor said "we appreciate America's concern." And he added: "We have had long ties, and we are not stupid enough to believe those ties should be broken." The cease-fire incident left a scar. Tom Woewiyu, Taylor's defense minister until he broke away last year, said the rebel army, known as the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, had postponed a full-force assault on the capital for several months at the urging of U.S. officials. "The Americans told us, 'it looks like Doe is going to leave-- why don't you hold off,' and we did because we didn't want to see Monrovia and its people destroyed." After Taylor realized that Washington had no intention of actively backing the accord he had made with Cohen, he feared he had been the victim of a American and Nigerian scheme to keep him from taking power. The delay probably cost the Front the chance to seize control of Monrovia, because the Nigerian-directed West African force was later able to push the rebels out of the capital, the only part of Liberia they never captured. When hostilities returned to fever pitch in Monrovia, the city became a 'killing field' of previously unimaginable proportions. 3. Preference for Arms-Length Diplomacy. Forceful diplomatic engagement of the kind that has long been routinely employed by superpowers was never attempted in Liberia. Instead, U.S. involvement was limited largely to the protection of American lives and the provision of emergency aid. And there was not much public pressure to do anything more. "Unless television images come into American living rooms of little starving babies," former President Jimmy Carter said in a 1993 interview with the author, "the U.S. government just looks the other way and pays very little attention to what's going on in Africa." In the case of Liberia, there was almost no TV coverage. Several members of Congress did press the administration to seek additional avenues for actions. One of those urging higher-level U.S. diplomatic activity in Liberia was Republican Senator Nancy Kassebaum, now chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee."We have a responsibility to help fix some of the problems we helped create," she said in a 1992 interview. One idea mentioned more and more frequently as fighting grew heavier towards the middle of 1990 was the "Marcos option" -- a U.S.-managed departure for Doe like the one arranged by the Reagan administration for Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. But the NSC Deputies Committee refused to let the State Department make such an offer to Doe, fearing further entanglement. As an alternative to American leadership, the administration gave encouragement to West African mediation and peacekeeping, initiated by the 16-nation Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), with Nigeria playing a leading role. "Ecowas said 'this is our responsibility' and they have been doing their best to handle what is a terrible situation," Scowcroft said in the previously cited interview. "If it can be handled by states in the area then that is how it should be done." West African governments, however, expected and wanted a more active American role. "We could not understand how the U.S. government with its long-standing relationship with Liberia could remain so aloof," said Ambassador Joseph Iroha, a career Nigerian diplomat who represented Ecowas in Monrovia for several years during the war. West African states sent in troops to stop the fratricidal killing," he said, because "we couldn't allow this sort of thing to continue." What Have We Learned from Liberia? Unfortunately, by the time Ecowas was able to organize an intervention force in late 1990, the country's dismemberment was far advanced and domestic division had been cemented with widespread bloody conflict. In addition, the peace force brought problems of its own. ECOWAS troops have been accused of various misdeeds, including some extensive looting in the early days, and they have at times turned brutal in the face of resistance to their authority, particularly from Taylor's NPFL. Nevertheless, the West African initiative represents the first time that a regional body had intervened to stop a conflict in its own region, and there is little disagreement that military and political actions of ECOWAS have saved many lives, at considerable cost to the member states. With Nigeria in the lead, participating nations have spent well in excess of $500 million in Liberia, according to estimates by both U.S. and Nigerian government officials. The operation is one of the largest in the world and the only major peacekeeping effort not run by the United Nations. Before the world body established a Liberian observer mission in late 1993, the only significant outside assistance for the West African effort was about $30 million from the United States. After a lengthy interagency debate early last year, the Clinton administration approved another $30 million to underwrite deployment of troops from outside the region. Critics of U.S. policy argue that even after the administration decision to limit direct American involvement, Washington could have done much more, both materially and diplomatically, to bolster the West African effort and make it more successful. No one can judge with hindsight whether the loss of an estimated 150,000 lives and the regional devastation spawned by the Liberian crisis could have been prevented without extended U.S. military engagement, but it is difficult to find a Liberian who doubts that firm U.S. leadership would have made a decisive difference. Many U.S. officials, too, now share Cohen's assessment that more could have been achieved without creating a quagmire. What is certain is that failure to stop the fighting during 1990, before the entire country was demolished, erected barriers to a solution that still have not been overcome. The result was to condemn Liberia and much of the region to continuing suffering and to divert scarce international assistance from economic development to sustaining refugees. The same tentativeness that characterized Liberia decision-making has been exhibited in a number of other crises in Africa and beyond. ... What could be interpreted as a tacit admission that a new approach is needed is contained in a re-examination of policy towards Africa, National Security Review 30, carried out by the Bush administration in the final months before Clinton took office. "There is little to be lost and much to be gained through an activist policy," the study concludes. "Our enormous relief efforts could be lessened by actions designed to eliminate the causes -- political, environmental, and economic -- of the crises to which we must respond. A diplomacy aimed at prevention and resolution of conflict is the sine qua non of an effective pursuit of all U.S. goals in the region." Crisis prevention has been the watchword of Clinton policy as well. "In the face of all the tensions that are now gripping the continent," the president told the White House Conference on Africa last year, "we need a new Africa policy based on the idea that we should help the nations of Africa identify and solve problems before they erupt." However, this administration, like its predecessor, has seldom found the political will to forcefully confront Africa's crises -- even when they bear American fingerprints. end ******************************************************* These excerpts are distributed, with permission of the author, by the Africa Policy Information Center (APIC). APIC's primary objective is to widen the policy debate in the United States around African issues and the U.S. role in Africa, by concentrating on providing accessible policy-relevant information and analysis usable by a wide range of groups and individuals. APIC is affiliated with the Washington Office on Africa (WOA), a not-for-profit church, trade union and civil rights group supported organization that works with Congress on Africa-related legislation. NOTE: For additional information on the content of material cited from another source, please contact directly the source mentioned in the posting rather than APIC. Note: If you did not request to be on our distribution list, you were suggested by someone else as likely to be interested, or you are receiving this on another list or bulletin board or as forwarded by someone else. If you wish to be removed from our list, to receive postings directly rather than through a bulletin board, or to suggest another address to be added, please send an email message to apic@igc.org. Please be patient :-). To receive a file of basic information on APIC, with a list of publications, send an email message to apic-info@igc.org. For basic information on WOA, send an email message to woa-info@igc.org. 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